


what a waste, what a waste, what a waste

by Iambic



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bad end, M/M, Role Reversal, Trespasser DLC spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 06:35:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4909054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dorian tells the truth, his friends hear a lie, and bringing about all the potential of the Tevinter Imperium will be the death of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what a waste, what a waste, what a waste

**Author's Note:**

> Let this be a warning: you go into the spoiler post on the kink meme looking for something relaxing to write, but then wake up an hour later sobbing your eyes out over what you wrote instead.

"One might think they would know better by now," Dorian says when Felicity Trevelyan tells him of the dead Venatori found in a corner of the garden.

"We beat them before," Felicity replies, frowning. "What do they have to gain, attacking us without Corypheus?"

Dorian laughs. For once, it isn't bitter. "People never learn."

-

"You gone all dark and speechy yet?"

Sera waves her ale around to draw spikes in the air. She's well on her way to sloshed, making the most of Dorian's offer to buy her drinks all evening in what has got to be a weak sorry for leaving again so soon and and not coming back. "You know. Cutting up slavies to off some magister you don't like? You're one now. You got license to do an evil laugh, right?"

"License, certainly," Dorian chuckles. "Ability, less so. You needn't worry, Sera; I am as I always have been."

"Stuck up, with someone stuck up your arse?"

"That too, I suppose."

-

Thom Rainier looks down at Sera, asleep and snoring with ale spilled all down her front. Dorian is shaking his head. "She refuses to believe she's a lightweight," he says. "Although tonight I fear that I'm to blame."

They hadn't gotten on well in the Inquisition, ironically, until Thom stopped being Blackwall. Thom had been firmly in the Herald's bad graces at that point, and while Dorian never said anything, Thom'd had the strangest feeling that Dorian didn't care for her all that much. Best not to look a gift companion in the mouth, though. And despite all Dorian's flaws, Thom can't dislike a man who cares so deeply for Sera.

"I'll get her to bed," Thom offers, and Dorian looks up, surprised. Two years in Tevinter can't have made him forget that friends take care of each other, surely. It's a fucked up place, but Dorian's a good man and a strong one too. Maybe he just assumed he had clean-up duty.

After a moment, Dorian relaxes into a smile. "Do be careful with her." He quirks up one side of mouth, twitching his mustache. "She'll be rather delicate in the morning."

-

Dorian lets himself into his room – well, their room, as no one had thought to get the Bull his own. Suits him, anyway, because they'd both be in one or the other anyway. If not for the demands of their responsibilities, the Bull has a suspicion that they would simply have remained in here this whole time.

He reaches for Dorian and pulls him in, and Dorian surrenders so easily to it. These past few days have been lazy, unhurried, to savor as much as they can before—

"Let me come with you," the Bull says into the shell of Dorian's ear. Dorian shivers. "Who's gonna take care of you without me around to kick your ass?"

"Of all the things you've done to my posterior, amatus, I can't say I remember any use of your feet."

It's funny, it's a good joke, but it's also a deflection. "Come on. Being holed in with all those vipers is only gonna give you wrinkles and grey hair without someone to remind you that you're _you_.”

What the Bull hadn't expected is the way Dorian's face falls, instantly, and how he presses it into the Bull's shoulder. "Kadan," the Bull says, helplessly tender. Dorian lifts his head again, and his expression has changed – suddenly, unreadable. There's nothing for it. The Bull wraps a hand around the back of his neck, pulls him in for a kiss. Dorian leans into it, almost desperate, but he also pulls away first.

"Believe me," he says in a voice gone hoarse, "with you around, I could never forget."

-

The Inquisitor doesn't like Sera. But she doesn't feel pain about it either, not like Sera does all rough resentment regret, she was supposed to be different, she was supposed to be good, now it's all wrong again – the Inquisitor doesn't feel that.

Dorian doesn't like her. It touches a hurt, but it's a hurt all foggy with red and Cole can't read it at all. He thinks maybe he doesn't want to.

There's a different hurt in him too, when he looks at The Iron Bull, single eye kind smile "I will never do anything to hurt you" and he never did, but it hurts oh it hurts just the same and of everything that should be easy to let fall play false find flaws it had to be real it had to be true

The Iron Bull's hurt stays the same. He knows but he doesn't know but he knows but he doesn't. Lost my boys for nothing no killed my boys for nothing could just fair to lose him and die of it. Cole can't help that hurt. It's a grief that belongs to the truth that The Iron Bull knows, and Cole doesn't have the right knowledge to help, or the right hands, or the right words.

-

The Herald leads them through a door into the room that Dorian doesn't know. But it's the one. The punchline to a joke nobody ever noticed being told, or perhaps the end of the plank, the last stair up the gallows. He might have lived, had the Herald thought to bring Vivienne along instead. In a way it's easier that he does not.

Hooded faces and pointed helmets await them, Aquinea at the fore. "A shame," she says to the Herald, though she doesn't bother to feign disappointment. "But I suppose you'll be happier not having lived to see your world destroyed and born anew in the glory of the Imperium of old. I will be merciful, I suppose."

Of course the Herald begins arguing. Who knows – she may even live up to her hubris. Dorian finds he doesn't care. He looks to the Bull, watching Aquinea with a slowly dawning recognition, and in that one horrible moment Dorian remembers that he very, very, _very_ much does.

But Dorian gave his word as a Pavus, and as little as that had seemed to mean to his father, it's an oath he will never break.

"Your posturing has been a wonderful appetiser, Herald." His mother doesn't smile. This isn't one of her tedious garden parties, despite her suggestions to the contrary. "But I tire of formalities. Dorian, if you will?"

Dorian sweeps her a bow and feels five eyes fix on him in an instant. "My dear mother," he says, lazily, meeting her gaze instead. "I regret to say it—"

To his right the Herald relaxes slightly, but to the right the Bull tenses. Ready to defend, Dorian realises, but he cannot think of it now. There is duty, his mother constantly tells him, that must come before desire. If he would see his country saved from itself—

"—but I will miss my time in the south."

He turns on the Herald to fix a nightmare in her head. Cole has vanished; Cole will take care of him, most likely. His mother's people don't really require him beyond his ability to compromise the Herald and her remaining allies, and she had known then, will not be surprised or even upset now, that this room is where Dorian will die for his country.

Cole has not put an end to him yet, so Dorian turns to face the Bull. A scrap of someone's robe dangles from one horn, and his swings haven't suffered for shock; for all he lets show, he easily could have been waiting, playing at love to keep Dorian close at hand. Perhaps he'd known already. But he would never have kept it to himself. Hissrad knew not to allow emotion to encumber duty, and surely that at least the Iron Bull remembers.

Selfish, Dorian knows, to wish the Bull would show his grief. The Bull cares too much to give Dorian what he wants.

The nightmare spell fizzles away, and Dorian turns to set fire glyphs around the Herald. Sometime before, he'd looked forward to seeing her die. Two years free of her, and the burning fury cooled to irritation, and now he no longer finds an investment in whether she lives or dies, or even the manner of her end. The true victory, Dorian supposes, will lie in her ultimate insignificance.

When he turns around again it is to come face to face with the Bull. It must be a curse upon House Pavus to regret what one wishes for, because there's pain on the Bull's face now, and Dorian had not intended to waver here.

"Well," he says, and his voice doesn't succeed much in steadiness, "I suppose this time you truly will be the death of me."

The Bull flinches, as he wasn't supposed to, because now Dorian wants to hold him or be held. His mother's disgust wouldn't matter, but Dorian doesn't want in his dying breath to bear the Bull's.

"What the fuck makes you think I'm gonna do that?"

Wrong answer, wrong answer, and Dorian is still alive, and waiting for the swing of an axe or a knife in the back is harder than he had anticipated. "Surely it would make for the greatest of ironies. Giving my life for my country only to lay it at the feet of my Qunari lover? The history books will love it. Perhaps I'll even be remembered."

The Bull, horrifically, tosses his greataxe aside, and Dorian just barely gets a barrier up in time to halt an opportunist. The Bull can't die, not until Dorian has.

"You did this," the Bull says, and he won't even bother to sound angry, only resigned. "Clean up your own damn mess."

A fitting punishment, perhaps. Perhaps with all the power in him at once he'll burn quickly. The Bull won't step away; he at least should feel no pain.

Fire comes to his fingertips, and Dorian imagines himself a bellows to a dreadnought weighed down by gaatlok. He breathes in—

The flames go loose, unfocused. Ice burns his chest instead, conjured from the business end of a wicked dagger.

"Please do reconsider following me," Dorian says, thickened with the blood in his throat.

"Father, do you see me now?” Cole’s voice seems very far away. “Have I done you proud in failing my mother so phenomenally, have I earned a place in your legacy, will he miss me, will he miss me, amatus, amatus, ama—"

 

-

\--

\---

\--

-

 

“Rhys said that killing them is wrong,” Cole says when the fight is over. Trevelyan paces the floor level of the room, spitting murder, but even if the Bull had wanted to join her, he’s not sure he could.

Death doesn’t look like sleep, as anyone who’s hauled bodies knows. It just looks like death. Sometimes it looks closer to consciousness, when the eyes open wide. But Dorian’s are shut now. His eyelids had grown cool before they felt the Bull’s hand.  His face is too relaxed, distorted with it, and only the blood that had trickled from his mouth and down his chin proves he was ever alive at all.

“I couldn’t save him.” Cole’s shoulders hang, his back curved forward. He’s never killed a friend before. That shit always hurts, but there isn’t a damn thing the Bull can do for him. The Bull’s never distracted the man he loves so someone else can kill him, either. “I couldn’t save him, The Iron Bull. He didn’t want me to try.”

The Bull could laugh, maybe bleed out some poison. Holding it in just makes it worse. He doesn’t. “He always said he wanted to change Tevinter. I just figured, not the same way that Corypheus wanted.”

Cole shakes his head, wide-eyed again. “No, The Iron Bull,” he says, “not Corypheus. The way father wanted. Anything for him.” Cole hesitates, and the hatred comes roaring back for a man who took that devotion and used it to betray his son. Whose son turned around and did the same fucking thing to the man who loved him.

“It changed, though.” Cole’s voice shifts to another familiar pattern, too familiar, and the Bull would shout at him, should call _katoh_. But he has to hear it now. Cole looks sadly upon him. “Anything for him. He turned traitor, he let himself break for it, shouldn’t let him break again, anything for him, anything, but father never raised a coward…”

 _Amatus_ , Cole had said, Dorian had thought. Last words.

You’d think he’d have known better by now.


End file.
